Alt+Media Is Winning: 60% Of Americans Distrust Mainstream Media

Ambassador Ryan Crocker, left, and Gen. David Petraeus, center, take part in an interview with Brit Hume on FOX News on Monday, Sept. 10, 2007 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

In 2009, only 45% fairly trusted the mainstream media, while 2 out of 10 have no confidence whatsoever. That trend continues today…

60% distrust rating is a critical mass achieved by the Americans. But it’s one thing to know that your government is lying. It’s another when one begin t contemplate what to do about it.

As Edmund Burke once said, “Evil prevails when Good Men do nothing.”

“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Less than half of Americans (45%) say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly — on par with last year’s record-low 43%. About 2 in 10 Americans (18%) have no confidence in the media at all — which is also among the worst grades Gallup has recorded.

The findings are from the same Gallup survey, conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 2, 2009, that found more Americans following political news very closely than in any other recent year without a presidential election. Despite the relatively high level of interest in political news in particular, many Americans appear to be consuming their news skeptically. Ten percent say they have a great deal of confidence in the media’s reporting and 35% have a fair amount, but 37% do not have very much confidence and 18% have none at all.”

In 2015, those negative figures aggravated as only 4 out of 10 Americans fairly trust the mainstream media…

“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Four in 10 Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This ties the historical lows on this measure set in 2014 and 2012. Prior to 2004, slight majorities of Americans said they trusted the mass media, such as newspapers, TV and radio.

Americans’ confidence in the media has slowly eroded from a high of 55% in 1998 and 1999. Since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media. Trust has typically dipped in election years, including 2004, 2008, 2012 and last year. However, 2015 is not a major election year.

Trust in the Mass Media Has Fallen More Sharply Among Those Younger Than 50

Trust in the media continues to be significantly lower among Americans aged 18 to 49 than among those 50 and older, continuing a pattern evident since 2012. Prior to 2012, these groups’ trust levels were more similar, with a few exceptions between 2005 and 2008.”

Gallup polls is of course conservative in favor of the establishment. The level of distrust could be higher than that. But the figures above showing consistency of descending trust trend is enough for us to say that the establishment media is in a decline.

Also, the data are only showing American viewers.only The European population, however, is more politically aware, judging from there periodic street protests on global issues like the UK planned enhanced engagement in Syria.

The declining trajectory of media trust will be further enhanced once the mainstream audience become more aware of the following facts:

Cable News Network (CNN)

Location: Atlanta, Georgia

Politics: Jokingly known as ‘Clinton News Network’ in the ’90s, CNN’s worldview can best be deciphered from studying the speeches of Hillary Clinton. The station oscillates between currently fashionable neoliberal causes.

Money Matters

Owned by Time Warner, a publicly-traded company. In the second quarter of 2015, the media conglomerate’s revenues were $7.3 billion, of which $2.8 billion came from Turner, CNN’s parent company. Turner is comprised of CNN, HLN, TBS, TNT, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network and truTV. In addition, the company manages several sports websites. Revenue for that operating division comes from content, subscriptions, advertising and delivery.

Essentials

CNN, the brainchild of Ted Turner, made its debut on June 1, 1980, from its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Competing with ABC, CBS and NBC, CNN became the first channel to provide news 24/7. Despite its humble beginnings, the network earned its reputation in the early 1990s during its live coverage of the Persian Gulf War. CNN was also the first channel to report the 9/11 attacks. While CNN strives for political impartiality, Pew research has revealed that its audience leans slightly to the left. The channel is currently available in 100 million households across the US. CNN has also expanded abroad with channels broadcasting in Turkish, Japanese and Spanish. With news operations in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and London, CNN International reaches over 290 million households further afield. Its coverage is carried by more than 1,000 affiliates worldwide.

Key People

Christiane
Amanpour

The British-Iranian presenter is married to former US Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin. Rubin was the State Department spokesman during Bill Clinton’s administration and later advised Hillary Clinton. Rubin also served as former candidate John Kerry’s senior adviser on national security. Kerry is now the US secretary of state.

That very family moment when CNN’s Amanpour interviews her own husband James Rubin from State Department on Russia. pic.twitter.com/Fo37lrro9x

Amanpour’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Rubin is a press fellow at the CFR. Amanpour herself has passionately supported a US intervention in Syria, shedding her pretense of journalistic impartiality and being presented as a ‘Middle East expert’ in the UK.

Following the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, Amanpour accused President Obama of lying about Islamic State and dismissing the only successful strategy against the terror group.

Describing Obama’s statement that the US strategy against IS was working as “pretty incredible,” Amanpour said “The only strategy that’s working is the strategy that he [Obama] tends to dismiss — and that’s the ground troop strategy.”

Somehow dubbed ‘Iron Man’ by his colleagues, he is the face of CNN’s political coverage. In the 1970s, the German-born Blitzer worked as an editor of monthly publications at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which is lobbying pro-Israeli policies in Washington.

Having joined CNN in 1990 as a military reporter, in 1992 Blitzer got the gig as the network’s White House correspondent. From there, he rose to become CNN’s lead political anchor.

Among controversies featuring Blitzer is an episode during a 2012 elections interview. CNN went live to the Iowa Caucus to speak to Corporal Jesse Thorsen, a US military veteran and adamant supporter of Rep. Ron Paul. Thorsen praised Paul, who was trailing frontrunner Mitt Romney by fewer than 200 votes, for his non-interventionist ideals. But just as Thorsen began to get passionate the feed went out. “Sorry, we lost the signal,” Blitzer said, dismissing it as a technical malfunction. A lot of viewers didn’t buy into the tech-error excuse and cried censorship.

As Pentagon correspondent, Starr was called a ‘spokesperson for the Pentagon’ by the late Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings. In a June 2013 CNN blog entry entitled ‘Terrorists try changes after Snowden leaks, official says’, Starr, citing a US intelligence official, wrote “several terrorist groups are in fact attempting to change their communications behaviors based specifically on what they are reading about our surveillance programs in the media.” During a monologue on his MSNBC program ‘All In’, Chris Hayes notes that all of the information passed on to Starr regarding terrorist communication patterns was “almost certainly classified.”

“This article not only self-servingly advances the narrative that the intelligence community would like us to believe, that the Edward Snowden links have helped the terrorists, but in doing so, it could be seen in doing far more to concretely alert terror groups to what the US intelligence community knows about them and their communications that anything published by the Guardian or the Washington Post [which broke the Snowden leaks],” Hayes said.

He went on to note that sharp contrast between how the Beltway reacted to Glen Greenwald’s reporting for the Guardian on the Snowden affair versus Starr’s use of potentially leaked information.

“When, as with Glen Greenwald’s reporting, the leaks are not specifically designed to advance the Pentagon’s agenda, then we have shock, controversy and calls for prosecution. But when they are, as with the Barbara Starr reporting, [then there’s] radio silence.”

Chris
Cuomo

Family political ties run deep for Chris. He is the brother of current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom he famously interviewed in December 2013 after a tragic train accident, throwing him softball questions and even admitting “we’re family, so we’ve been talking about this a lot” at one point in the segment.

Their father, Mario, also held the governor post from 1983-94.

Chris’ wife, Cristina Greeven, is the former editor of Gotham — a lifestyle magazine aimed at New York’s super wealthy.

Controversies

Numerous sources have taken CNN to task for presenting war as entertainment, something considered to have begun during the first Gulf war in the early 1990s.

Amanpour was heavily criticized for “being a cheerleader for the Bush war drive against Iraq.” German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung declared that CNN’s conflict coverage was similar to that of the Super Bowl. A CNN reporter was quoted as saying that bombers taking off from Saudi Arabia was a “sweet, beautiful sight.”

In China, the network has been lambasted by Xinhua news agency for offering one-sided coverage of disturbances in Urumqi and Tibet. The same concerns hovered around their coverage of Thailand’s 2010 political protests.

In 2008, CNN showed violent clashes between police and protestors in Belgrade, while speaking of a nationalist threat in the Balkan nation. There was one major problem — the images shown came from Budapest two years earlier. Budapest is the capital of Hungary.

Later that year, during the South Ossetia War, CNN used images from Georgia’s destruction of Tskhinval to illustrate a piece about the Russian bombardment of Gori. CNN ignored the criticism and never addressed it.

Amber Lyon, a former correspondent at the network, claimed in 2011 that she had been instructed by CNN to ensure her reports helped sway US opinion towards supporting an attack on Syria, and even Iran. She also alleged that this was common practice at CNN. Lyon also stated that Bahrain’s government had paid CNN for positive coverage.

In 2006, CNN was banned from Iran for incorrectly translating a statement by then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. CNN reported that he had said: “the use of nuclear weapons is Iran’s right.” What he actually said was “Iran has the right to nuclear energy. A civilized nation does not need nuclear weapons, and our nation does not need them.” CNN opted to apologize for the mistake, prompting the Islamic Republic to lift the ban.

CNN’s technical mess-ups are legendary, from basic geographical fails to misidentifying religious sites. In 2007, they used Osama Bin Laden’s photo captioned with Barack Obama’s name in a Wolf Blitzer segment called “Where’s Obama?”

CNN once again dropped the ball while covering the November 18, 2014, terror attack in Jerusalem. Reporting live on the horrific attack at a Jerusalem synagogue, which left three Israeli-American citizens and one British-Israeli citizen dead, the American network ran the questionable headline: “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians killed in synagogue attack,” failing to note that the two Palestinians were actually the attackers.

What’s worse, CNN ran a graphic that said that the attack happened at a “Jerusalem mosque” provoking a wave of social media outrage.

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Columbia Broadcasting Network (CBS)

Location: New York

Politics: Accused of pro-liberal, pro-Obama bias

Money Matters

Sumner Redstone is the majority owner of CBS Corporation and Viacom through his ownership of National Amusements. The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on January 3, 2006. Previously it was traded under the name Viacom until it and its subsidiaries were spun off from CBS in 2005. In the second quarter of 2015, its revenue was $3.22 billion, of which $1.6 billion was from advertising, $815 million from content and licensing distribution, $752 million from affiliate and subscription fees, and $58 million from other revenue streams.

Sumner Redstone is a self-described “liberal Democrat” and a frequent donor to Democratic campaigns. As of November 2015, the 92-year-old is worth $5.3 billion, and placed 94th on the 2015 Forbes 400 list, as well as 77th in US billionaires (225th worldwide). As a college student during World War II, he was selected by a Japanese history professor at Harvard University to serve as a codebreaker of Japan’s military and diplomatic transmissions. Redstone served as a special assistant to US Attorney General Tom C. Clark before he took over his father’s cinema chain in 1954. He was an early visionary of the importance of content over distribution, coining the term “content is king,” and so invested heavily in film production studios. His daughter, Shari Redstone, serves as the vice chair of CBS Corporation and as president of National Amusements. Together he and his daughter own all of National Amusements, owning 80 percent and 20 percent of the company, respectively, after Redstone’s son Brent dropped a lawsuit against the two in 2006, in exchange for a buyout of his one-sixth stake.

Leslie
Moonves

The CBS chairman is a self-described “mediocre” former actor, having landed a few forgettable television roles after college. Entertainment is his focus rather than politics. However, he does have a family link to the latter field, being the great-nephew of David Ben-Gurion, the Polish-born first prime minister of Israel. Moonves married CBS personality Julie Chen, who serves as host of primetime show ‘Big Brother’ and as a co-host of morning show ‘The Early Show’, in December 2004, just 13 days after he was granted an early divorce from his first wife. He previously was in charge of first-run syndication and pay/cable programming at 20th Century Fox Television, where he also served as vice president of movies and mini-series before becoming president of CBS Entertainment in 1995.

Scott
Pelley

The anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News and a correspondent for the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, Pelley is held in higher esteem than many of his colleagues. In 2012, the Columbia Journalism Review wrote Pelly was “probably the most well-qualified and proven television journalist ever to ascend to the anchor job.” He has often been the target of conservative media, which accuses him of bias.

In 2010, Pelley said Hillary Clinton “doesn’t let anyone work harder than her” and “she’s the only person in American politics with global star power close to” that held by President Barack Obama. He was also accused of being partial to former President Bill Clinton. His most controversial statement, however, came when he spoke of interviewing climate change deniers in a global warming piece as being the same as finding a “Holocaust denier” if doing an interview with professor and political activist Elie Wiesel.

In 2013, CBS’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan was put on a leave of absence after an erroneous report from Benghazi in Libya.

“Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the US government was misrepresenting the threat from Al-Qaeda, and urging actions that the US should take in response to the Benghazi attack.”

The statement continued that there was a “conflict in taking a public position of the government’s handling of the situation while continuing to report on the story.” Glenn Greenwald had previously written that that Logan had done courageous reporting over the years, but had come to see herself as part of the government and military.

This year Logan was back in the news after she recorded a story on Ebola in Liberia, failing to manage a single location shoot while remaining ’self-quarantined’ in a luxury hotel . Logan has been criticized for being part of a phenomenon in which ’celebrity journalists’ make themselves as much a part of the story as the news itself.

Logan has been in and out of hospital for years, due to the lingering effects and complications from injuries suffered in a brutal sexual assault in Egypt in 2011. After the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, Logan was reporting from the celebration on Cairo’s Tahrir Square when she was attacked by a group of men.

In the summer of 2015, Logan reportedly signed a new two-year contract with CBS, the details of which have not been disclosed.

Controversies

Killian documents and ‘Rathergate’

During the 2004 presidential campaign, veteran news anchor Dan Rather questioned President George W. Bush’s service with the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. In his report for ‘60 Minutes’, he used four documents that were supposedly written by one of Bush’s commanders in the early 1970s, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, who had already died. People immediately began questioning the documents’ authenticity, noting that they were most probably forgeries written on a modern word processor. Others accused the show of political bias. CBS News stubbornly defended the story for 12 days before conceding it could not confirm that Killian had actually written them.

An independent investigation found that, while it could not outright say the documents were forged, it had serious questions about their authenticity and the way CBS News handled them. The panel also took Mary Mapes, the story’s producer, to task for calling a senior official in the John Kerry campaign prior to its airing, calling her action a “clear conflict of interest that created the appearance of political bias.” CBS News Senior Vice-President Betsy West, who supervised primetime programs; ‘60 Minutes Wednesday’ executive producer Josh Howard; and his deputy, senior broadcast producer Mary Murphy were asked to resign, while Mapes was fired.

A movie about the scandal, ‘Truth’, was released in October 2015. CBS has refused to air ads for the film on any of its networks.

Liberal bias

In 2001, Bernard Goldberg, a CBS staffer for 28 years, wrote a book ‘Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News’. The contents were explained by the title. The book takes aim at what Goldberg viewed as intrinsic liberal bias in the American media, though others claimed it merely pointed out how the line between editorializing and news reporting were increasingly becoming blurred.

CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson controversially resigned in March 2014. Sources told Politico that she “had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias, an outsize influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting,” while CBS staffers called her reporting on the Obama administration agenda-driven and questioned her impartiality. In November of that year, she released a book titled ‘Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.’

John Miller’s Snowden interview

John Miller was a CBS ’journalist’ with a seemingly boundless career trajectory. From 1994-95, he was deputy police commissioner of New York City. In 2005 he was appointed an assistant director of public affairs for the FBI — becoming the bureau’s domestic spokesman.

In 2011, CBS News christened Miller a senior correspondent, and he regularly made appearances across their major programs. Miller famously packaged a one-sided interview with the FBI’s deputy director on Edward Snowden, where the whistleblower was hammered and portrayed as a traitor and “enemy of the state.”

Where does Miller work now? He is deputy commissioner of intelligence & counterterrorism for the NYPD.

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Fox News

Location: New York

Politics: Mention Fox to any American liberal and then take out a thermometer to see what temperature blood boils at. Fox is widely held to promote conservative political positions and was a neocon stronghold in the days before their positions went mainstream in the US print media.

Money Matters

Fox News is a subsidiary of News Corp, which is publicly traded on the NASDAQ and S&P 500 Components. In the first quarter of News Corp’s fiscal year 2016 (current third quarter), the company earned $2 billion in total international revenues , $124 million of which came from its cable network programming segment. Overall, that came from $880 million in advertising, $639 million in circulation and subscription, $392 million in consumer and $103 million in other revenues.

Essentials

Fox News Channel was established by media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996, primarily to compete with CNN. At first it reached only 17 million US homes — less than a third of CNN’s reach. Fox News surpassed its top-rated rival in 2002. It had on average 1.2 million viewers in prime time compared to Ted Turner’s 900,000. It has been number one since then. Covering over 37 percent of US television homes, Fox has 17 owned-and-operated stations and affiliation agreements with 177 other TV stations. Besides straight-up current affairs, Fox News developed a reputation for having a strong opinion component. Despite its ‘fair and balanced’ motto, Fox News generally works with right-wing experts and commentators, including high-profile Republicans. Its political leanings fell under fire after Murdoch’s News Corp. donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association in 2010.

Key People

Rupert
Murdoch

The 83-year-old is a living legend of the media world, rising from provincial Australian beginnings to become, arguably, the global corporate media’s most powerful figure. Murdoch’s philosophy changes with the prevailing winds. He can be pro-Scottish independence personally, while his newspapers oppose it. He is fiercely Republican, but his London tabloid, the Sun, steadfastly supports the British monarchy. Another paradox is that the Aussie owns the most conservative and patriotic major TV news outlet in America, but is not nearly as conservative as his media outlets would have you imagine.

Murdoch ran afoul of President Barack Obama in October, after calling Ben Carson, one of the contenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, “a real black President who can properly address the racial divide.”

Meanwhile, he had nothing but disdain for billionaire Donald Trump, the Republican candidate who is not part of the GOP establishment. Despite Murdoch’s resentment, however, his Fox Business Network continues to give Trump air time.

In June 2015, Murdoch resigned as CEO of 21st Century Fox, appointing his son James, 42, to the post. He “retired” to the post of executive chairman, which he will share with another son, Lachlan, 43.

Bill
O’Reilly

The ‘face’ of Fox. O’Reilly has carefully crafted a no-nonsense, working-class Irish Catholic image, the self-proclaimed voice of the everyman. O’Reilly calls himself ‘traditionalist’ and refuses to be affiliated with either left or right. That ethos is at the heart of his ‘No Spin’ zone. He rises above the political fray. To disagree with him is not to take a conservative or liberal position, it is to take a ‘pinhead’s’ position. Of course, for anyone who watches ‘The Factor’, it doesn’t take long to find out which side of the political aisle consistently adopts pinhead positions. And the nature of his most controversial statements are also telling. For example, in August 2010, O’Reilly accused the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of aiding Al-Qaeda. Why? Because the ACLU had filed suit saying American citizens accused of terrorism were being denied due process by being killed in predator drone strikes before they had been convicted of any crime.

“The ACLU has always been a far-left outfit, but it is now actively helping terrorists who kill people all over the world,” O’Reilly said.

His bluntness also applies to religion. In 2010, as a guest on the view, the panel was discussing a lower Manhattan Muslim community center. O’Reilly was opposed to its construction, saying: “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” This caused Whoopi Goldberg to walk off the set of panel show ’The View’ and sparked a massive blowout.

O’Reilly made the 9/11 attacks a pet cause, often invoking self-righteous anger, even at those who had actually lost family in the attack, all because they differed on policy. On February 3, 2013, O’Reilly invited Jeremy Glick on to The Factor. Glick, the son of a Port Authority worker who died in the 9/11 attacks, publicly opposed the American invasion of Afghanistan.

When Glick accused O’Reilly of evoking the sympathy of the 9/11 victims to advance his political agenda, O’Reilly became livid, telling him to “shut his mouth.”

Of course, while Glick was O’Reilly’s “most offensive interview,” he’s not the only one who’s been told to “shut up.”

Roger
Ailes

Ailes is the president of Fox News Channel and was previously a media consultant for Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush — all Republicans. In keeping with the tone of his network, Ailes referred to National Public Radio (NPR) as “Nazis” for firing news analyst Juan Williams, after Williams had made harsh remarks about Muslims.

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty [about] using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Ailes would later apologize to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for his comments.

Perhaps it’s better to leave the incendiary comments to his TV personalities.

Controversies

Political bias

Many Fox hosts admit that the station is biased towards the Republican Party. The network denies it. During the Iraq War, Fox was accused of ‘underplaying’ bad news stories about US involvement in the conflict.

In 2009, a major row erupted between President Obama’s administration and Fox. After the network virulently attacked his healthcare reform plans, Obama appeared on all major US News programs, except those on Fox. For its part, the network chose to ignore Obama’s public appearances on a number of occasions.

Anita Dunn, Obama’s communications director, even argued that “FOX News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party.”

Later that year, the Los Angeles Times reported that at least one Democratic strategist was warned by the White House to never appear on Fox again.

When the White House attempted to block Fox reporters from the press pool covering the Treasury Department, other networks rose up in protest. Fox eventually profited from the feud, with the network’s ratings rising 13 percent that summer, according to CBS.

IS execution video

In February 2015, Fox News showed an unedited, 22-minute video of the gruesome execution of the Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh. Captured by Islamic State militants, al-Kasasbeh was locked in a cage and set on fire. Fox was the only US network to show the video in full, and the first time it did so with an IS execution.

“After careful consideration, we decided that giving readers of FoxNews.com the option to see for themselves the barbarity of ISIS outweighed legitimate concerns about the graphic nature of the video,” the network said in a statement.

In October 2015, during a discussion of Australian gun control laws promoted by a number of US Democrats, Fox political news correspondent Tucker Carlson said that Australia “has no freedom” and that people there “go to prison for expressing unpopular views.” Carlson’s remarks prompted a strong backlash from Australians.

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